Orders of Affection(Carnegie Mellon, 1996)

Praise for Orders of Affection

"These graceful poems are serious without being weighted, and emotionally rich without being rhetorical. If they are nearly all shaped as elegies, they keep their losses in perspective: poetry may not be able to restore, but it can redeem. Their lyricism is quiet because it is so disciplined, and it is clear because it understands that grief is only what we start with. What we can end up with, sometimes, is poetry as good as this." — Stanley Plumly

Once in Ohio I would have done almost anythingNot to have had to see her joining meThat first time in the claw-footed tubIn Athens, her robe falling and a longRed welt, the kind a bicycle chainCan make, bristling over the ribs, the leftSide of her chest. She stood there,And I could make out past her, drifting Through the chute of light at the window, clusters Of snowflakes like scraps of paper from a bonfire, Lifted by their burning and then released. I knew that everything had been changed, And I was afraid, I was like a cedar fittedFor the winter with snow; and then she started to Step in, and I helped her sit down facing me As the water rose around us.